January 2007

January 26, 2007

I have a rare and often misdiagnosed disease: Sundance Envy. The main symptom is celluloid deficiency indicated by breathless longing. Dr. Freud, are you listening? Many of my film critic colleagues attend this premier film festival, getting the scoops on the parties, the celebs, the shwag, the buzz on movies before anyone has seen them! What reporter in her right mind wouldn’t want to be there?

Fortunately I get potent, rehabilitating doses of expert and vivid reportage from Roger Friedman’s Fox 411 column and from The New York Times Carpetbagger David Carr. The news however on the latest films seems mixed: some are even more disturbed than I am. Take, for example, a new movie featuring the graphically filmed rape of the lovely, precocious 12-year-old Dakota Fanning. According to Fox 411, even sicker than the film are the preteen’s parents for allowing her to participate in such exploitation particularly as the scene is gratuitous, the movie bad, and, in a peculiar twist, defended by various anti-rape organizations. As well meaning as these groups may be regarding an issue that is certainly urgent, the cure may be to avoid this movie altogether.

Perhaps we will be spared. As of this writing, no distributor has wanted to touch it. And how about the movie about the vagina with teeth? Well now we veer close to Portnoy! One question: do the biting genitalia belong to anyone’s mother?

January 24, 2007

If you were glued to the set yesterday morning as I was, listening for this year’s Oscars nominees, you could not help but hear announcer Salma Hayak’s joyful yelp for her pal Penelope’s Best Actress nod. Not presidential hopeful Howard Dean’s “barbaric yawp,” heard ‘round the world, the soft, friendly petard broke up the rather formal proceedings. Too bad the academy did not acknowledge Cruz’s film, the crowd-pleasing Volver, a comic, magic realist tour de force by Pedro Almodovar, in which the ghostsof the past do not rest until the sins of the fathers are redeemed. Cruz famously has a padded rump in the manner of full-bodied movie legends Sophia Loren or Anna Magnani. And let me assure you, that bottom did not look as good on Ellen Degeneris. Of course Almodovar had already won an Oscar, for All About My Mother in 2000. When I asked the Spanish auteur then how it felt, he said winning an Oscar was like having a baby and introducing it to all your relatives. Everyone wants to hold it, touch it, and tell you who it resembles. So this year he will not be birthing its twin in neither category of Best Foreign Language Film nor Best Picture, as many Oscar watchers predicted. Oh well, this director is infinitely imaginative. If he makes his movie Tarantula, based on Mygale, a gender-bending French noir by Thierry Jonquet (City Lights), he’ll be up to his old kinky, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! tricks. Maybe Antonio Banderas, an actor he made famous, will star. You know, says Almodovar, he’s very big now. He may be too hard to get.

The Foreign Language list is always odd. I don’t always agree with the choices but this year The Lives of Others (Germany) and Pan’s Labyrinth (Mexico) vie for my vote. You can see Guillermo del Toro’s layered masterpiece, a political parable cum fairy tale, in theaters right now. You will have to wait until early February for the pre-Glasnost film by young director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, about East Germany’s Stasi, the Communist era secret police who spied on citizens they deemed suspicious. Do not miss either one.

Nobody I know thought David Lynch’s Inland Empire starring Laura Dern would be nominated; depending on your taste you either love his weaving of bizarre non-narratives, or hate it. For the record, I sit on the love side, finding his extravagant subjectivity mesmerizing. Surprise surprise, the man is capable of a linear story. His book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (Tarcher/Penguin), influenced by such classics as The Upanishads and Bhagavad-Gita is his take on the relationship between meditation and creativity, a kind of how-to manual. Positing that “Ideas are like fish,” he basically says that if you want to get them, you have to dip into deep water. Before you say, “DUH,” read this quote from the chapter called, “Light of the Self:” “Negativity is like darkness. So what is darkness? You look at darkness, and you see that it’s really nothing: It’s the absence of something. You turn on the light, and darkness goes.” Simple, right? But guess what? It works. I’m writing this blog after all.